The Council Smiles With Knives

Kael did not ask me to hide the mark. He did something far more dangerous. He asked me to trust him.

"Whatever happens in that hall," he said, low and fast, as Seraphine's footsteps faded down the corridor to wait for us, "do not speak unless I ask. Do not look at Ezekiel. And do not let anyone see you flinch."

"That is three instructions."

"I am a generous king." He picked up a dark wool cloak from the back of his chair and settled it over my shoulders, covering the glow. His fingers lingered at my collar a second longer than they needed to. "Stay close."

I stayed close.

The Hall of Moons looked different at night.

The great glass ceiling no longer poured light onto the black marble. It had turned into a dark, silent mirror, and the only brightness came from a ring of lanterns set around a long council table that someone had dragged into the centre of the floor. Blood still stained the altar steps. Nobody had had time to clean it.

Seven men sat at the table. They wore the grey velvet of the Council of Alphas, with silver wolf-head brooches pinned at their throats. Behind them, along the walls, stood a double line of Silver Guards, and beyond the guards, in the dark, I could feel more people watching. Servants. Pack elders. Anyone who had heard the bell and come to see what it meant.

I walked into that room beside the king with my spine straight and my hands folded, and felt every eye in it land on me like a thrown knife.

"Majesty," said the man at the head of the table. He was heavy and grey, with a thick neck and small shrewd eyes. Lord Varek of the Northern Packs. I knew his history by heart. He had backed Kael's father in the war that had destroyed my family. "Forgive the hour."

"I do not," said Kael. "But I understand it. Speak."

"The bell has rung."

"I heard."

"The Keeper's bell." Varek said the words carefully, as if testing their weight. "Which has not rung since your mother's death. Which is tied, by the oldest law of this house, to the mark."

"The mark," Kael agreed, "which is mine to deal with."

"Is it?" A second lord leaned forward, thin and sharp-faced, with a face like a heron. Lord Hollis. "The mark is a mystery of the Moon Goddess. Not a private matter for the royal bedchamber."

"It is a private matter for my wife's skin."

There was a stir. Somebody hissed. Varek's heavy brow lowered. "Then it is true. It has risen on the bride."

I felt Kael's hand settle against the small of my back, warm and steady through the cloak. He did not answer at once. He let the silence build until a nervous lord at the far end coughed.

"Yes," he said. "It is true."

A ripple ran through the hall. Not a gasp, something lower. The sound of a pack hearing something it had not expected to hear.

"Then let it be shown," said Hollis.

"No."

"Majesty—"

"I said no." Kael's voice did not rise, but the lanterns seemed to dim. "You will not strip my queen in the middle of the night to satisfy your curiosity. If the mark is real, it will be seen in time. If you doubt it, you doubt me."

"It is not doubt," Varek said, with an effort at gentleness. "It is law. The Keeper's mark is a matter of state. The throne must be certain."

"And it shall be." Kael turned his head. "Ezekiel."

My heart gave a single hard thud.

The royal adviser had been sitting at the foot of the table, hands folded in his pearl-coloured sleeves, so quiet that I had almost forgotten him. Now he rose. His movements were unhurried. In the lamplight, his face looked almost young. The skin was smooth, the eyes clear, the hair silver but thick. A man of sixty, they said. I did not believe it. I had never believed it.

"Majesty."

"You will examine the mark. Alone. In a private chamber, in the presence of the Queen's own handmaid. You will report to the council what you find. Is that acceptable?"

"Perfectly." Ezekiel smiled at me. "I have spent a lifetime studying the old ways. I should be honoured."

I remembered Kael's instruction. Do not look at Ezekiel. I looked at the table instead.

It took less than ten minutes. They put me in a small anteroom off the hall, with a screen and a lamp and a plump, frightened maid who kept apologising. Ezekiel stood outside the screen while I lowered my robe, and I heard him draw in a long, slow breath.

"Ah," he said softly.

I did not speak.

"It is quite perfect." His voice was warm and wondering. "I have only seen it once before, you know. In another life."

"Whose life?" I said, before I could stop myself.

"A very old friend's." A pause. "May I ask you something, my lady? Not as the king's adviser. Only as a curious old man."

"Of course."

"Have you ever felt a pull?" His voice dropped. "A hum beneath the stone. A call, as if something below the citadel were speaking to you."

My blood froze. I had felt it. Since the moment I stepped inside the gates, a faint, constant vibration, like a bell whose sound had gone too deep to hear.

"No," I said.

"Nothing at all?"

"I am wolfless, my lord. I feel very little."

"Of course." I could hear him smiling. "Forgive me. I forget how young you are. It is a fault of old men, to think everything is a riddle."

He did not touch me. I will give him that. He stood on the other side of the screen and breathed, and the mark glowed on my back like a lit coal, and I understood that he was not looking at it the way a stranger would. He was looking at it the way a man looks at a face he has known for years.

When I came out, my hands were steady. My heart was not.

Ezekiel reported to the council in a calm, scholarly voice. The mark was genuine. It was an ancient royal sign, last seen on Queen Liora, chosen by the Moon Goddess herself. It had risen on Lady Elena Voss on the night of her wedding, and the bell had tolled in welcome.

It was a sign of the Goddess's favour, he said.

Kael did not smile. He did not need to. "The Goddess has been silent for twenty-eight years," he said, "and now she speaks. Perhaps the council will consider what that means."

"It means," said Lord Hollis, rather faintly, "that the king is blessed."

"Or that the queen is a witch," muttered someone at the back.

"Careful," said Kael.

"Majesty, it is a reasonable fear. She is wolfless, and an unknown, and the mark appeared the very night an assassin—"

"The assassin was after me," Kael said. "She was not."

"And yet—"

"Lord Marnell." Kael's eyes found the speaker, a stout, red-faced man at the corner of the table, and the room seemed to shrink around him. "You have a granddaughter in the Silver Guard, do you not? Two sons at the northern border?"

Marnell went pale. "Majesty."

"I would hate for them to hear you called my wife a witch."

"I misspoke."

"I thought you might have."

I almost admired it. The way Kael turned the room with a few quiet words, the way fear moved through the lords like wind through wheat. He was not a cruel man, but he understood power. He had been shaped by it.

While he spoke, I let my eyes drift along the council table. It was the one thing I had been told never to do in a crowded room, and the one thing I could not stop myself doing.

Lord Varek's thread ran back to his wife, who sat behind him in a wool shawl: silver, soft, true. Hollis had no thread at all. Marnell's was a faded, comfortable blue, the colour of a very old friendship. I felt a small, foolish relief at each of them.

Then I reached the third man from the end, Lord Aldren, a quiet, sandy-haired noble who had not said a word all night. His thread ran across the table to a young woman standing behind the guards, and it was bright, perfect, and utterly even.

Too even.

Forged.

I looked at the woman. She was staring at the floor. Her hands were clenched so tightly in her skirt that the knuckles had gone white. When Lord Aldren coughed, she flinched, and the thread did not flicker.

I tore my gaze away. A cold sweat prickled along my spine.

It is not only the assassins, I thought. It is the council. It is the whole court.

How many people in this room were living inside a lie they had never chosen?

"Something troubles you," Kael murmured, so quietly that only I could hear. He had not turned his head.

"Nothing," I whispered.

"Your pulse is loud."

"Then stop listening to it."

The faintest hint of a smile touched his mouth, there and gone. "Impossible. You are very loud."

I looked at the floor to hide my own.

Then a new voice cut across the hall, light and sweet and amused.

"Forgive me, cousin, but I think we are being unkind to the lady."

Every head turned.

Seraphine had been sitting near the back, in the dark, in a chair by the pillar. Now she rose and glided toward us across the marble, still in her wine-red gown, her red-gold hair gleaming. She looked wonderfully calm.

"Our new queen has been married ten hours," she said, and the lords chuckled, relieved to be released. "She has been shot at, covered in blood, interrogated by the council and stripped by an old man with a lamp. If I were she, I would be halfway to the border. Let us at least let her breathe."

"Seraphine," Kael said dryly.

"I only wish to help." She stopped beside me and slid her arm through mine. It was a friendly gesture, light as a ribbon. But her fingers pressed into my elbow with surprising strength. "It is a hard thing to be a stranger in a royal court. No one tells you the rules. I would be glad to be her guide."

"That is generous," said Kael.

"I am a generous woman."

I looked at her.

I should not have. Kael had told me not to look at Ezekiel, and I had obeyed. But he had not told me not to look at her.

Up close, in the lamplight, the cut thread was even stranger than I remembered. It did not hang loose from her chest like a dying bond. It was a clean, deliberate sever, with the stump sealed shut like a healed scar. Whoever had been on the other end had not been torn away. They had been removed. And Seraphine had spent a long time learning to live without them.

"You are staring, cousin," she said softly.

"I am sorry. I am tired."

"Of course." She smiled and bent close, so that her mouth nearly brushed my ear, and her voice dropped to a murmur no one else could hear. "But you are not looking at my face, are you, dear? You are looking at the space beside it."

My breath stopped.

"I know what you see," whispered Seraphine Blackthorn.